I was listening in on someone talking about video games the other day and how bad they are for children. I managed to hold my tongue and listen, instead of butting in and killing the conversation with my own opinions.

The guy's relatively level-headed feelings against gaming got me to thinking. His argument was that video games and television and computer time is all about watching, while most everything else is about doing.

Playing a game, he said, is in fact just working your way through a thinly veiled experience pre-created by programmers with inevitable outcomes. In other words, they set the rules and you have to play by them.

His example, I thought, was a really bad one. He was talking about baseball video games. At one point I almost piped in and pointed out that the real game of baseball has its own rules that have to played by. How is that any different, I thought?

Then I started thinking about playing baseball when I was a kid, down at the deadend in a place we called The Hole. There may have been rules we followed for the baseball games, but we didn't have to follow them and sometimes we down right cheated. See, you can do that in real life, you can break rules.

That's the big difference between real life and video games. No matter what, you always have to play by the game's rules in a video game. It's like pre-chewed creativity, you can only do what the programmers have always thought of for the most part.

I started wondering. What should we expect to get out of our video games? Should it just be about enjoying the moment, entertaining oneself? Or should you be able to come away with lessons. The experience of playing real baseball in a real dirt and weed-filled hole wasn't about accomplishing the inevitable it was about the communal experience of being there and playing.

Video games, I think, are too often about the destination and not nearly enough about the trip. We churn through games to beat them, not to experience them. Maybe that's OK, maybe games should just be about starting and finishing something. But wouldn't it be nice if they could be about that space between the saves as well?

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